If you want to see how I’ve organised my Living Dex, check out this post: https://darylh.com/gotta-catch-em-all-living-national-dex-progress/
Firstly, let’s define the task. A Living Dex means that I want to have at least 1 example of every Pokémon stored in the PC or Pokémon Home. This also means that if I evolve a Pokémon, say Pikachu into Raichu, I need to breed, catch or trade another Pikachu and keep both of them.
I’ve already been working on my Living Dex on Pokémon Shield, with its much shorter Pokédex. So far, as you can see in the gif above, it’s going pretty well.
With Home now bringing all 890 Pokémon to the Switch, if not specifically Sword and Shield, I want to have a complete Living National Dex. This is a pretty big undertaking, but before I start hunting for the creatures I’m missing I need to figure how to organise it!
On Shield, I have PC Boxes labelled by Galar Pokédex numbers, 30 in each box. Box 1 is 1 – 30, Box 2 is 31 – 60, all the way up to 420. I want to do the same on Home, extended to all 890.
But what about duplicates?
30 Pokemon in numerical order sounds nice and simple, but that accounts for only wanting one of each. What if I want both genders for breeding? Or two that both have great stats? Then there’s the issue of Forms.
Over the decades, Game Freak has introduced more and more variations of the same Pokémon. Currently, we have these differentiators:
- Unown varieties – there are 28 different Unown shapes (I don’t have them all)
- Gender differences – female Pikachu have heart shapes on the end of their tales, unlike the males
- The many hats of Pikachu
- Rotom machines
- Deoxys forms
- Regional forms, we now have Galarian and Alolan forms of common Pokémon like Meowth
- Gigantamax – these look normal in the box but have a different battle form
- Shinies, of course!
- and many, many more.
The list really does go on. Battle specific forms, like Dynamax and Mega, don’t matter since they aren’t going to show up in the box.
Sorting what I have
I have just dumped all the Pokémon from Ultra Sun and Bank to Home. Home gives you 6000 slots (on Premium) which means I could have a max of 6 forms of each Pokémon. This should be plenty, considering most Pokémon only have a single form.
1169 Pokemon, gathered across years and generations of titles. Though far from a complete collection, I have multiple forms and Shinies of many Pokémon.
So my plan is currently to do this:
- Move all Pokémon to a later Box Space, making some room. These “Spaces” are essentially boxes of Boxes. I’ll leave a Space or two for the Living Dex + overflow.
- Back in Box Space 1, rename all the Boxes. 890 Pokémon ➗ 30 slots per box = 30 Boxes (with 10 spare spaces). A single box space is perfect for a Living Dex of single forms then!
- I will collect all special forms, including Shinies, into Box Space 2. I’ll group them in Boxes by form type, such as Shinies, gender forms, Pikachu, etc.
- For all the “standard” Pokémon that are left, I have to go through the National Dex on Serebii or Bulbapedia and one-by-one find them and move them into the appropriately numbered boxes. This is the bulk of the work and will be a lot of manual labour.
Then what?
Next will be to complete my Living Dex. With the return (yay!) of the GTS Global Trade System on Pokémon Home, I’m hoping to avoid having to go back to my 3DS and starting from scratch, since I’ve boxed up all the creatures I had on those games and transferred them to Home.
What about you? Got any advice?
Who else is building a Living Dex on Home?
Got any hints or tips that might make this process easier?
How should I sort the additional forms?
How many of you are doing the crazy thing of building a Shiny Living Dex?
